WOD 29 Jan: Fake Colin II: The revenge of Fake Colin

With the real Colin Menniss away on official business, I once again got to step into the role of Fake Colin for the day.

I was joined this morning by the always affable El Hefe (Efe), who did a sterling job of running the 0900 Beginners and 1130 classes despite my best efforts to distract him with inane mutterings and misinformation. Top show, big fellah!

We kicked off with a little game of “plank racing”, using the conveniently sited carpet tiles as makeshift slides. All went pretty smoothly with only minor debates about “faulty” carpet tiles, and “difficult” terrain.

The burpee was performed as a training exercise for special forces operatives working on the top of a moving train carriage. As obsticles moved toward them quickly, they needed to be able to jump over, or duck under these quickly, and swiftly return to a fighting stance.

So today we temporarily put aside technical perfection, and focused on speed: one burpee every three seconds, kind of speed. Or 100 burpees in five minutes, if you want to think of it that way.

Everyone had a go at the following drills

4x 15 seconds of burpees, with 15 seconds rest between sets

3x 30 seconds of burpees, with 30 seconds rest between sets

Done at one per three seconds pace, this equated to 50 burpees in exactly 5 mins. Which was nice.

Burpee fun behind us, we got on to the business of the WOD. This week it was one from the history books as I dusted off “Hail to the King” for a new audience:

Hail to the King

5x Press, 10x push-press, 15x push jerk (x2)

33x Back squats

5x Press, 10x push-press, 15x push jerk (x2)

33x Front squats

5x Press, 10x push-press, 15x push jerk (x2)

33x Overhead squats

This one quickly beats up on shoulders, to the point that the 99 squats almost feel like a rest!

The combination and volume of presses reward efficient technique; properly racking the bar on the shoulders, breaking at the hip to drive the bar up, using the big muscles in the lower body to help the shoulders, catching the jerk in a squat, and so on.

Those that worked this out posted some excellent times with pretty demanding weights. Those that didn’t…soon learned!